When Google Maps was first announced the project originally started externally at a company called Where 2 Tech run by brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen. Google acquired the company and the brothers set to work developing what they had into what became Google Maps.

The brothers left the Google Maps team and moved on to a different project, one that is being called Google Wave. Google Wave is described as a personal communication and collaboration tool which translates as a new way of communicating beyond what we currently have from the separate services such as e-mail and instant messaging.

The thinking behind Google Wave is that today we rely on e-mail as the main way to communicate, but the concepts behind e-mail are 40 years old and pre-date the Internet. The brothers decided to start again; using all the new communication tools we now have as a base and attempted to create a brand new way of communicating. The result is Google Wave.

The questions they asked when creating Google Wave were:

Why is there a division between the different ways we communicate? (e-mail, IM, documents)

Can one solution incorporate every way of communicating online and still remain usable?

What happens if the system is designed around what computers can do today?

Two years later and Google are presenting Google Wave in a very early stage so as to get developers involved. It will be open source as Google want help from the community to develop what they see as the replacement for current communication tools and accounts are already being given out.

So how does it work? The video above gives you a series of scenarios and how Wave copes with them. Essentially everything revolves around a Wave and Lars describes how it works as follows:

Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content – it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Google not only want help developing this communication tool, but they also want help figuring out how far they can push this and in which directions.

Matthew’s Opinion
The Google I/O video is well over an hour, but is worth watching to find out what Wave is about. I think the easiest way of describing it is that it turns communication into an object and disregards the different types of communication out there – it just incorporates all of them. You just participate with whatever communication method you like and it just builds up as a wave.

The communication is clearly a lot more fluid. For example, when you are both online an e-mail thread becomes like an IM conversation. Your e-mail responses appear instantly in another user’s inbox. If you arrive late to the conversation then you still get all the information, but there is also a playback feature so you can watch the conversation as it happened before you arrived.

I am still going through this video, but it’s clear this is different, yet still usable and comfortable for users. That’s the important bit. There are some big changes in Google Wave, but they don’t seem overwhelming giving it a better chance of working and becoming popular among users.